What makes for interest is that if a coin like ZEC or ETH fails due to a hack.
A new al-gore-rythm should pop up to replace it. SINCE pc parts companies would all benefit
I have been following the ZEC development closely. Their intention was to be CPU mineable with GPUs getting maybe 4X speedup. Of course it has not turned out that way.
But one of their policies that they stated was the intention to adjust the PoW parameters if necessary if a shortcut that was too strong was found in the algorithm.
They intend to keep ASICs at bay. I think this is totally possible.
One way to do this would be to increase the memory requirements. Right now the ZEC PoW targets 1GB but due to optimizations is only using about 600MB on the GPU... they could increase this to 3GB relatively easily, and make ASICs that much harder (and obsolete a whole set of them in one fell swoop).
Equihash is memory hard-- meaning high performance memory will be the path to the best results.
It remains to be seen whose HBM implementation will be the winner this year-- NVIDIA & AMD are both working on HBM cards for later this year.
My R9-Nanos are blazing fast for ZEC mining ~ around 440sols/s per card.
R9-Fury X even faster at 470sols/s.
Nanos are with 4GB HBM though -- wont be useful if ZEC gooes beyond 4GB.
8GB HBM memory will be the way to go.
The only downside was HBM cards are bloody expensive.
I think many memory chip vendors, like Samsung etc. will benefit .... just like what Phil predicted.